Should a single company control the Social Web?

Dr. Matt Lee 🎃

@evan absolutely when are we creating this fictional company?

Evan Prodromou

@elight by other do you mean, other than you?

Evan Prodromou

This seems like a lot of Strong Nos.

I'm glad to hear it. I don't think Bluesky, Farcaster, or any other company should convince everyone to use the protocol they control. Their investors have bet that we will.

I like using and contributing to open standards developed in neutral standards bodies like IETF and W3C.

I will not stop saying that open standard protocols are better for the Internet than proprietary ones.

Evan Prodromou

I will, however, continue trying to learn how to say this in ways that are clear and comprehensible to listeners and don't push people away.

Evan Prodromou

I also think it's *great* when companies implement open standards. That puts them on an even playing field with individuals, families, coops, non-profits, universities, governments, and other parts of civil society. I hope the companies named above find better ways to engage with the wider Internet. I'm happy to help them however I can.

Evan Prodromou

I am sad that the ActivityPub network is still vulnerable to this kind of attack.

Protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP are ubiquitous enough that there aren't startups getting funded to create alternatives. ActivityPub is not yet that ubiquitous in its own problem space.

I am taking the news of the funding of Bluesky and others as a wake up call to help build the infrastructure and resources that ActivityPub needs to be the unquestioned default social networking protocol.

Khleedril

@wonderfox_dev @evan Those are lonely attention-seekers. Some even admit as much in the discussion, saying they only voted so others would notice them.

Bruce Elrick

@evan We need to keep the successful insertion of inscrutable DRM into official HTML standards by powerful interests top of mind when defending ActivityPub from the corporations at the gate.

Evan Prodromou

@khleedril I've had some people get quite angry at me for saying that I don't think a single company should run the Social Web.

I'm glad to know that the resistance is more about how I say it, and not that I say it at all.

Evan Prodromou

I don't like conversations about comparing protocols on technical grounds. It's not that I think ActivityPub cannot stand up to others -- it's a fantastic, expressive, flexible, secure and extensible protocol -- but I think the framing ignores the governance issues. I do appreciate the challenges, though -- it helps make ActivityPub better.

Evan Prodromou

I think ActivityPub is flexible enough that experimentation can happen in a huge number of ways. Building an extension on top of AP is very straightforward and extensions carefully designed can easily be backwards-compatible. It's simply untrue that anyone needs to start over from scratch with an incompatible base protocol in order to develop interesting new features.

Evan Prodromou

Lastly, I think a lot of the discussion around ActivityPub in some communities is really negative. Instead of celebrating the immense success of the protocol, and its impressive positive characteristics, there's a lot of picking at flaws around the edges. In those communities, people find my enthusiasm about AP irritating. I understand why people might want to talk that way, but I also prefer to talk about why I love it, and how we can make a good thing better.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan this isn't a slight against activitypub but i don't think the comparison to http makes sense. partly because activitypub in a sense *is* http, at least in how it's broadly implemented. but it's just one class of http messages. i don't think it makes sense for all web traffic to be in activitypub format.

Evan Prodromou

@trwnh I don't think you understood the example. I tried to rewrite it to make it clearer in which way I am comparing AP to other protocols.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan evan, might this be an unfair framing? the activitypub specification has a lot of positives, but the problems are a) not always at the edges, and b) mostly in how popular implementation ("the fediverse") has diverged from the spec, in some places quite significantly, to the point that anyone wanting to implement "activitypub" to the letter of the spec will not be able to talk to anyone on "the fediverse". webfinger and http sigs are one thing, but the core message semantics are another.

infinite love ⴳ

@evan the rewording is better, but i still think that "problem space" is not sufficiently defined. you call out "social networking protocol" specifically, but i think part of the problem is that there are people interested in activitypub that aren't as interested in social networks as you are. the relatively poor adoption of C2S as a standard API for managing web resources is either insignificant or very significant, depending on who you ask.

McNeely

@evan I mean this question in the least antagonistic way possible, but how many of the perceived problems with AP are due to the flagship implementation (Mastodon) vs the actual protocol?

One of my worries is that developers are so focused on compatibility they end up repeating acknowledged mistakes of the past.

Evan Prodromou

@McNeely that question is fine. I agree with the framing; people who experiment with, for example, different kinds of activities or content types can feel frustrated when Mastodon handles them poorly. Finding the right solution here is important to the future of the Fediverse, and probably the future of Mastodon.

Evan Prodromou

There seems to be some misunderstanding on my intention here.

I am discussing why some people find my upbeat take on AP uncomfortable. This is not a discussion about the qualities of ActivityPub nor is it an invitation to debate the characteristics of ActivityPub.

If you would like to talk trash about ActivityPub, there are lots of places where that conversation is welcome, but this thread is not one of them.

dbat :godot:

@evan who voted yes? shivvvver.